Johanna Florez

This is my first time doing a review like this. I'm breaking the book down into different areas and rating each one out of five stars.

POV: First person past tense. The narrator is Hazel Grace Lancaster, a terminally ill teenager.
Plot: ** It wasn't a mystery or anything but it didn't pretend to be. Straightforward but not boring.Characters: **^ (3.5) They were believable and reasonably interesting.Style: **** John Green is a pleasure to read. I love that he makes us laugh out loud and sob just as hard. This man. There's not much place for foreshadowing (except the physical pain Augustus experienced when his body was made of cancer) or symbolism, but his writing it very effective. Setting: **** Contemporary Indiana. Where else would you set a romance between cancer kids? Not bad.Vocabulary: ** Seriously. I felt like my mom should underline the words and make me look them up in the dictionary and copy the definitions into a notebook. Hamartia, anyone?
Appropriateness: ** Unfortunately, this book contains a lot of swearing. For some reason, swearing in narration bothers me far more than swearing in dialogue does. A character swearing adds depth to them. A narrator swearing makes it a foul book. G.d. and b.s. are used with great frequency. The f-word and p-word as well as other obscenities make a few appearances. In addition to issues with language, there is THE SCENE (Hazel and Augustus make love in a hotel room- not explicit but still worth mentioning) and other sexual references. Parents might want to preview this book before letting their kids read it.
Themes: *** This story tells us that love can really, really hurt, but it's still worth it. This theme is also communicated clearly.(A not on appropriateness and themes. For me, the themes came through stronger than the inappropriate material did, making it a good book for me to read. Others children and teens might not experience the same thing. It takes discretion.)Overall enjoyment: ** Beautiful book. It made me laugh, it made me cry.
Quotability ***** “Pain demands to be felt” “Sometimes you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelicial zeal...” “You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you” and numerous other stand-alone gems hidden in the pages and paragraphs.

Here it is.

The worst book I ever read.

Everything happened at once, and nothing happened at all.

I will say this. This book is perfect for you if you like reading about shallow, spoiled, bratty, selfish fourteen-year-olds who don't know a thing about life and think they do, kissing their boyfriends from sixth grade (you read that right) and then leaving the boys hanging while they sneak around their parents' mansions and their friends party in the Hamptons with high school boys. Complaining. The. Entire. Time.

If the main character had actually shaped up by the end of the book that would've been something. But here's what happens. She kissed her boyfriend in sixth grade, didn't see him over a weekend and didn't talk to him after that. Just avoided the boy who supposedly had been more like a best friend than a boyfriend. (You know, 'cause eleven-year-olds have the maturity to really know.) Then again at the end of eighth grade, to the dismay of her friends, she got back with him. Not really. But kind of. They made out while in swimsuits and this eighth grader "noticed how warm his skin was".Then, go figure, she doesn't talk to him.At the very end of the book they kiss again. And that's all. It doesn't go on after that, to say she actually treated him right. For all we know, they never spoke again as long as they lived. If that had actually been slightly resolved it could've redeemed a story that was shallow from start to finish. But no one gained any responsibility or maturity by the end. Ooh, she humbled herself enough to accept her friend's gift of the dress they both knew she wanted more than anything. She once complimented a girl she'd been a little mean to before. Not enough to counterbalance that all along her group of “best friends” were talking about each other behind their backs.

None of these brats changed or shaped up by the end of this novel. It took over two hundred pages to say “The brats stayed brats.”

But, if that's what you like, this book is for you. Hope you regret reading it less than I did. (Not really.)

I found this book pretty engrossing. (But maybe I'm just like that :P) I stayed up past midnight to finish it in one sitting.

While I felt like it was a good book, I also thought that it seemed an awful lot like other books I've read more or less recently. A lot of the ideas of this Society echo concepts found in Lois Lowry's books The Giver and Gathering Blue.

For example, just like in The Giver, people who apply to get a spouse are matched up with someone based on personality, skill, and other factors. The people have no choice. Yet the main character finds himself (or in Matched, herself) wanting to be able to choose.

Also, for the elderly, what other people think of as peaceful, natural processes turn out to really be the government's way of controlling who lives and who dies. When their time is up, the old are poisoned.

In Gathering Blue, those few artists who create things are taken away. They are forced to use their skills to create what the leaders want them to make. This is what I thought of when I read about Ky being the only person who knew how to write. He could make swirling cursive, but everyone else only knew how to tap letters on a touchscreen.

The love triangle of Cassia, Xander, and Ky reminded me a bit too much of Katniss, Gale, and Peeta in the Hunger Games. The whole best friend/other guy conflict. Whether to choose the one the government wants her to marry, or the one she currently has feelings for. However, I was relieved to find that Cassia's outlook on the love was very different from Katniss's. I can't really describe exactly how it was different... but it was refreshing, really, to see a different spin on the love triangle.

Having said all that, the content still somehow felt original. It seemed like the author did have her own story to tell. It only reminded me of those books because I'd read them recently and thought about them a lot. I was the one drawing similarities, not the author stealing ideas. Still, I'd recommend reading all these books far apart in time. They each have their own merits but they'll sound too similar if you read them one after another.

I don't know if this is a new style among authors or what. A lot of books seem to end leaving the reader with more questions than they had at the beginning. This one did for sure. It seemed that everyone had dozens of deep, dark secrets. But it also made sense- they were realizing that there were some things they simply could not tell each other.

So there you have it. A decent read. As tired as I am, I don't regret losing several hours of sleep over it.

Whoa.

I was assigned this book for school reading. It was supposed to be a couple of chapters a day. I read through it in one sitting. I had to! Some books, it feels like I will ruin my life if I put them down. It was so with The Giver.

I'm not going to go into the utopian/dystopian setting or the political messages. What struck me about the book was memories. The people of Jonas's community had no memories other than here and now, the Sameness. It was safe, and they were all content because they did not know any other way. It sort of blew me away when I realized that no one in the book had any concept of hills or color, because those were outside the realm of their experience. Things I take for granted. And none of them had experienced love, which I have also lived with my entire life.

The Giver and the Receiver were the only people who knew suffering, hunger, poverty, agony, war, or terror. They were alone in their pain. But they were also the only ones who knew true joy, love, and courage. They needed the good memories of many generations, “back and back and back”, to face the pain that brought wisdom. Someone needed to bear all those memories. They alone had the strength.

Basically, anyone who has traumatic memories, this book will be an engrossing and hard read. It brought to mind a lot of stuff for me. Some pages it was mostly memories of the joy of love. Other pages it was the pain of loneliness. But after reading this book, it's like I'm armed with the confidence, that even when the bad memories threaten to overtake me, when it hurts just to breath, I have the strength and wisdom to use all my memories to keep others safe.

I HAD THIS WHEN I WAS LIKE 7 AND MADE UP WHOLE NEW STORIES WITH THE STICKERS

This is a satisfactorily written story, intended for children, about a child. What stuck with me most when I read it was the strong feminist messages, which could get preachy at times. The author pointed out a time in American history when women definitely needed liberation from the strict cultural codes that kept them from pursuing careers they could have been passionate about, had they been given the chance. I just think a nine-year-old has other things on her mind than how much she wants to be a doctor and how unfair it is that society won't let her. Yes, she thinks about that, but she also plays games and thinks about her friends and does, you know, CHILD things. Ann's age also made these messages less compelling than they would have been with an older character. Oh no, a third grader can't be a doctor. What does a nine-year-old really know about her adult passion anyway? I think when I was nine I still wanted to be a “famous person”.

The last problem was that the ending pretty much nullifies all these messages that the whole book is structured to grind into your head. The epilogue reveals that Ann doesn't end up becoming a doctor, or even a midwife. She takes care of her husband and son, just the way her parents said she would. It seems to say that they were right: women aren't meant to pursue careers. "When you're older you'll realize that women are really meant to be housewives. It's the only place they find fulfillment." We got a hundred-page crash course on Why Women in the Eighteenth Century Need Feminism (To Meet Their Pre-pubescent Hearts' Goals) and then the ending was like, Nah, never mind.

Now that all sounds bad. I did enjoy reading this book. I admire Ann's tenacity and the way she took such good care of her family when they all got sick. But I left with the feeling that the author really wanted to right a book about feminism, not about a little girl. And then the author shot herself in the foot with the ending. So that was nice.

It was a while ago that I read this but I remember how intense it was. It was like everything good about the other books, and then better. I can't explain why I love these books so much. I'm older than the target age but I am a big fan. Always showing off my knowledge gained form the 39 Clues.

Adorable and utterly relatable. It's laugh-out-loud funny, especially for me, the third child who thinks maybe her parents should've stopped there. The mother is my mother- worried about cleaning! ;) The mopey teenage brother's hygiene habits made me think of my dear brother. It's so funny you'll forget you're reading a book about a friend who has mysteriously vanished without a trace. Of course, everything turns out well in the end. This is a book worth re-reading.

Holy Cow, this book was intense, in part because it really seems like something that could happen in America's future. Loved it.

Thank you to Shelf Awareness Pro and Abrams Books for the free ARC.
This slice-of-life book was both easy and hard to read. No individual chapter took long for me to get through, but some chapters really troubled me and made me re-read them before moving forward.
For readers who already recognize the humanity of trans youth, I find this useful for expanding sensitivity to a broader spectrum of trans kids. Not a masculine/feminine spectrum, but rather the kids stress-puking at every legislative cycle and those who really don't care that they're trans. I had ideas of how to support trans kids somewhere between those two positions and I feel slightly better equipped if I work with any of the more extreme ends.
For any reader who's coming in with another perspective, I fear that the realistic writing and the “just like other kids” thesis might reinforce the notion that gender nonconformity is just a phase. Teenagers do a lot of poorly-thought-out things, as evidenced within this book by many of the interactions with friends, family, schoolwork, etc. This book would not convince anyone that teenagers have the wisdom to determine their own gender identity. That's probably not the goal, it's just something that struck me.

Thank you Shelf Awareness and Wednesday Books/St Martin's for this advance reader's copy! I can't wait to dig into this one.

Thank you to Shelf Awareness for the free copy!

I'm not supposed to quote from uncorrected proofs so I'll just say, I am not sure why the line in the last chapter about sand castles is what finally got me properly crying.

This book was filled with frustrating characters who I wanted to shake sense into. Why would you think your husband would be okay with this? Why would you entertain the notion that this could be good for your children? What is wrong with you people??

But I loved the structure of the story, gradually revealing the things family members have in common without their knowledge or permission. I might reread this at some point to see if there are parallels earlier in the two timelines that I didn't know enough yet to notice.

Thank you to Abrams for the ARC!

As a homeschooler walking through the teen section of the library, this book caught my eye. Yay! A book about other homeschoolers! Finally, something good that I can relate to!

Not so much.

Maybe my Christian homeschooler experience is a little too narrow. But nothing in this book was at all relatable to any part of my education. It's not like the girl, oh, hmm, maybe DISCUSSED her education with her parents. She was enrolled in middle school, but she just walked out on the first day of eighth grade. Because it felt right in her little hormonal heart.

So she wanders around instead of being in school. While foraging for food she meets a boy who is playing his violin, outside, in his pajamas. And we know how it goes with thirteen-year-olds, they know everything there is to know about the world and relationships so they fall in love and start going out. Things don't stay quite as sweet as you'd like. I definitely remember the scene with hands in each other's back pockets, then hands going up the girl's shirt.

The characters are also very disrespectful. Sure, no kid is perfect, but this girl decides to stay at home when at the same time it seems like all she does is complain about how her mom is doing things. There's some swearing among adult characters. They all act stupid! Like, we could go about this like adults, thinking and planning and sharing opinions and making compromises, or we can scream at each other while our young girl goes into the woods to make out with her boyfriend.

If you like this kind of book, the useless sort of book that doesn't really teach or entertain, the kind of book that's mostly good as a time waster and as kindling, then go ahead and read it. Be aware that this isn't even close to what homeschooling is like. I would strongly recommend against reading this book.

bawling eyes out

While I really loved this book and thought it ended the trilogy well, I felt that it could have been better written. One of my friends gave this plot synopsis: “Get hurt, pass out, wake up on drugs, get hurt, pass out, wake up on drugs.” That's what the book feels like sometimes. However, the repetitive injuries didn't keep me from reading this book over and over.